Silverware wrote:
This might get a little crazy, as XCom2 is basically Long War 1 anyway, especially if you crank up difficulty and use some AI improvement mods.

No need to get carried away, LW even on Normal is easily the tougher experience when pitted against modded Legendary XCOM2 offers a great deal of free actions and high mobility to get you out of tough spots, LW is a lot more strategic and crawly, no to mention the actual strat layer.

I'm really excited about LW2, though I hope they don't clutter everything too much. I'm not a huge fan of the perk pack, as there are so many uninteresting '+1' style options.

Strangely I seem to be doing better with Long War on than in the vanilla game, 4 or 5 missions now, most flawless or up to 2 hits, no casualties. Going well so far, still wish there was a way to choose your class instead of it being randomly assigned and having to put them in the AWC for retraining.

I have however, been REALLY enjoying it. Much more so than vanilla xcom2.

The Shinobi class is bloody great, a full squad of them could do magic... and that is my goal to eventually get. :V
The AI does better, and has more tools to use, and you find yourself fleeing from fights a lot more.

It really puts you in the right mood, when you get into an area, bash a VIP in the skull, grab him, and run like hell.
Vanilla XCom2 never made it feel like it was worth running immediately, it was often better to farm the incoming reinforcements from a stable position.

There are lots of positive changes to the game. And a very engaging new enemy parallel to the classic avatar project.
3 new soldier types from new factions to fight with XCOM.
Squad management is also more complex now, making the player facilitate and care for more soldiers (and not just the "core squad")

PS: dont forget to select it at the launcher, I accidentally played the first few mission in the classic mode.

technical sidenote:
I only wonder why the savegames are always so big.
1 or 2 kilobytes should be sufficient to represent the game-state...

I don't see how. At the very least, we have timers, a map of the world, various objectives on the map, different places explored, etc. And that's without even getting into the characters - which, in my opinion, are the place it would really get heavy. Lots of voice options, color options, model options, etc. And remember this can't use an integer-based system because it needs to be mod-compatible. As a result, it likely uses strings for everything, is my guess, and probably saves the data into the save file, defaulting to a vanilla part if the mod part is removed or missing. Also remember there are a lot of images taken. Some of these images wind up actually appearing in the levels on XCOM propaganda posters, especially closer to the end of the game (which is really cool!) - so there's plenty of info they're storing. Also don't forget user bios, history, and so forth. XCOM2WOTC also includes "experiences" for specific soldiers - being set on fire X times gives a x% chance of them gaining a fear of fire, for instance. These things must be tracked! Most games also track a lot of other statistics behind the scenes. Some of these get used for achievements, others are for the developers to help balance the game better in future patches (if necessary - often they are there "just in case" but never end up getting used). In some instances such as Shenmue, there are hundreds of tracked statistics ("How many drawers opened" as an example) that never get used at all.

1 or 2 kilobytes is an incredibly small save file. XCOM2 WOTC's save file size of 1-2 MB seems about what I'd expect, without them storing images.